The Latest

Wednesday, October 8, 2014

FINALS UPDATE: ABC had another huge adjustment Sunday, with Once Upon a Time up two tenths to 3.3 (now 27% above week two of last season) and Resurrection (2.0) also gaining two tenths to stay ahead of last season's low point. Revenge (1.4) also picked up a tenth. Madam Secretary ended up at 1.6, up two tenths week-to-week. It's not a huge shocker given the lead-in spike, but it suggests the show has at the very least stabilized.

After a huge opening Sunday, it was the worst of all worlds for Fox's second Sunday. First, the animated anchors showed absolutely no residual heat from their massive openers last week. In fact, it was the opposite. The Simpsons (2.0) was down nearly 50% week-to-week and Family Guy (1.9) nearly sixty percent. For Family Guy, this marked a new series low just a week after its highest result in over three years. And second, the 9:30 newbie Mulaney (1.0) had a truly ghastly showing even given its lead-in's softness, dropping nearly 50%. (Silver lining: at least Brooklyn Nine-Nine (1.6) still looks semi-respectable at 8:30.) Bob's Burgers (1.4) did OK at 7:30 (though it had some local NFL help) and seems like a good bet to replace Mulaney at 9:30 very soon. Fox is actually airing a Family Guy repeat at 9:00 next week, so it was almost like they were counting on this Mulaney result.

On ABC, the show that seemingly should've been most inflated last week may actually end up holding up the best in week two. Once Upon a Time had a still very stout 3.1 at 8/7c, still up double-digits year-to-year and just 16% behind last week's premiere even before finals adjustments. Resurrection (1.8) was the show that really got mowed down, preliminarily 28% below last week's big opener, while Revenge (1.3) dropped two tenths. But we'll have to see what happens in finals!

More on CBS after finals, though CBS actually allowed the lineup to start on time for viewers of 49ers/Chiefs rather than shift them to the blowout in San Diego. It looks like Madam Secretary may have gone up a bit, but we'll see.

FULL TABLE:

Info

Show

Timeslot

True

A18-49

Skew

Last

LeLa

Rank

y2y

TLa

Ty2y

Once Upon a Time (R)

0.9

32%

-45%

+38%

1.3

Once Upon a Time

3.3

45%

-11%

-0.4

-0.7

2/2

+27%

-12%

+27%

3.4

Resurrection

2.0

38%

-20%

-0.5

-0.4

2/2

n/a

-22%

+3%

1.9

Revenge

1.4

34%

-7%

-0.1

-0.5

2/2

-26%

-7%

+22%

1.7

ABC:

-20%

+20%

NFL Overrun

6.9

45%

-23%

-2.1

n/a

5/5

-30%

+590%

-43%

7.0

60 Minutes

2.5

22%

+127%

+1.4

n/a

2/3

-34%

+92%

-67%

1.6

Madam Secretary

1.6

17%

+14%

+0.2

+1.4

2/3

n/a

+14%

-38%

1.7

The Good Wife

1.4

16%

+8%

+0.1

+0.2

1/3

-13%

+4%

-30%

1.6

CSI

1.3

21%

+0%

+0.0

+0.1

1/2

-38%

+0%

-13%

1.7

CBS:

+85%

-51%

Football Night in America p2

2.7

45%

+125%

+1.5

n/a

1/5

+29%

+125%

+29%

3.0

Football Night in America p3

3.9

46%

-15%

-0.7

+1.5

4/5

-5%

-15%

-5%

3.8

Sunday Night Football

7.4

48%

-15%

-1.3

-0.7

6/6

+6%

-15%

+5%

7.2

NBC:

-22%

-8%

The Simpsons (R)

0.6

45%

-94%

-50%

1.1

Bob's Burgers

1.4

57%

n/a

n/a

n/a

1/1

-36%

-84%

-22%

1.6

The Simpsons

2.0

59%

-49%

-1.9

-4.9

2/2

-33%

-49%

-33%

2.0

Brooklyn Nine-Nine

1.6

61%

-38%

-1.0

-1.9

2/2

+14%

-38%

-16%

1.6

Family Guy

1.9

66%

-58%

-2.6

-1.0

2/2

-24%

-56%

-24%

1.9

Mulaney

1.0

55%

n/a

n/a

n/a

1/1

n/a

-79%

-52%

1.2

Fox:

-75%

-32%

Big4:

-25%

-23%

KEY (click to expand)

A18-49 - Adults 18-49 rating. Percentage of US TV-owning adults 18-49 watching the program.Skew - Percentage of adults 18-49 within the show's total viewership.Last - A18-49 difference (percent and numerical) from the show's previous episode.LeLa - A18-49 difference between the show's lead-in and its lead-in for the previous episode.Rank - The A18-49 rating's rank among the show's episodes so far this season.y2y - Percent difference between A18-49 and the show's rating a year ago.TLa - Percent difference between A18-49 and the network's rating in the timeslot one week ago.Ty2y - Percent difference between A18-49 and the network's rating in the timeslot one year ago.True - A metric that adjusts the A18-49 rating for overall viewing levels, competition and lead-in. PRELIMINARY CALCULATION. For finals, see SpotVault.

I said yesterday in the quesiton that I was expecting the same horrible retention that Mixology had out of MF when it premiered. For some reason, the situations seemed really comparable to me. Mixology had a 53% retention on that night and Mulaney just had the same awful 53%. Juts horrible. I have nothing against the show but I confess that I am happy with anything that makes my FOX comedies (New Girl, Mindy, B99) look better, particularly B99 and this was certainly one of those.

Elsewhere, OUAT is still doing incredibly well. This is beyond what I was expecting for the premiere last week and it could adjust up again! Revenge held well considering what it did for the premiere I think. Resurrection though lost almost half of the lead-in which is not good at all. They might have an issue there.

All in all, Brooklyn Nine-Nine did OK. It could turn into new Community - multiple renewals despite bad ratings, thanks to most of other networks' comedies rating even worse.But we'll see, entire Sunday lineup is low already in Week 2, while: Spring w/o NFL is coming.

Mulaney premiered even bellow my rather pessimistic prediction (1.05 average for first 10 episodes, with the rest of episodes burn off on Fridays). Cancel (confident). Next.

I didn't feel like Once Upon a Time's debut was overly inflated. With the Frozen plotline carrying through season 4A, the only time I think we'll see a big drop off is between the Fall finale and Winter/Spring debut when it wraps up. Time should be able to land in the upper 2's and spike for the midseason finale.

Resurrection's drop isn't great, but it's holding about even with Revenge's performance in the hour y2y. So that combined with the y2y improvements in the slots for OUAT and Revenge (vs. Betrayal) and ABC's still coming out ahead.

Bob's Burgers is going to get the jerk around this season; it should replace Mulaney at 9:30 pretty soon (probably after the World Series) but then get shuffled back to 7:30 once Fox has enough time to promote Bordertown. 9-9 looks promising to stay at 8:30, especially since Fox needs to be patient with something/anything on its schedule.

Actually, looking at the map on 506sports, a big swathe of the country had the Jets-Chargers game - all of the northeast corridor, all of Florida, and nearly all of Ohio, plus much of Indiana. That's a heck of a lot of big markets.

Not cutting to a game already in progress makes some sense. But I'm surprised that CBS cut off a game it was already airing in a market just to start the line-up on time; if another Heidi situation had happened the network would be in real trouble.

No Question about The Originals tonight?!?! Just kidding. But I will post my thoughts here as a comment.

With The Vampire Diaries coming back at its lowest levels yet things don't look promising for The Originals, which also has to contend with a new time slot. The overall gauntlet doesn't get much harder than The Voice, The Big Bang Theory, Gotham, Dancing with the Stars, and Monday Night Football. But it has a special recap episode of Supernatural that may attract more eyeballs than usual since that drama launches tomorrow. The Originals may pick up some of its heat in reverse, similar to the relationship between Grey's Anatomy and Scandal. And since it'll be a whole week of The CW going at near-full strength (Jane the Virgin and The 100 join in later weeks) I think its audience will start paying more attention to the network as a whole.

I'm amazed I'd not read about that before, but that's an amazing story. Really surprised to read they pulled away when it was a one-possession game, thought in the context of it being discussed that it was a huge late comeback!

I personally am not a fan of CW Questions if only because the Line has to be set so low. But I also think that it's arguably more interesting to see what happens with The Originals once it's fully apart from Supernatural (even if tonight's episode is just a recap special) and it has to try and launch Jane the Virgin. Besides, the biggest deal for The CW comes Tuesday night.

I always end up hating CW questions because quite often I am prone to lose them by 0.1 or so which is very frustrating, particularly when it comes down to rounding and nothing more. However, I still prefer to have them despite those caveats than not have them. I am sure Spot will do one for the flash but I was hoping TO and Arrow would get one as well!

I tend to chicken out on lower-rated CW ones because I get worried that the overwhelming majority will win on any possible line (as seemed to be the case with Reign last year). Perhaps I should have gone with 0.65 here though. Seems like it might have been more split than I expected.

Fair enough. As I've said, I often hate those questions exactly because of how hard it is for rounding and such to make a difference (I would even argue that for the CW you should consider going for a line rounded to the 100th instead of the 10th if available) but I still prefer to have them than not to have them for whatever it is worth it. So well, if you are in doubt about whether or not giving us question about Arrow, The 100 and Jane, please do!

An Arrow question for this Wednesday is really about The Flash's coattails and not about Arrow itself. The better CW Wednesday Question to me is about The 100: even going into the summer and without an original Arrow lead-in it pulled 0.6's. And it maintained visibility by staying on the schedule in reruns until Penn & Teller bumped it off, which I think will help make it a stronger limited-series show relatively speaking compared to The Following, Resurrection, Under the Dome, and Sleepy Hollow.

The big problem is that season 2 is launching against World Series Game 1. Arrow takes a dip against baseball and so did The Tomorrow People last year. Can The 100 bat a thousand for The CW?

I agree with Spot and omabin on that - season average about 0.65 in A18-49. And I think it should be around 0.80 in W18-34.

It's a bit counterintuitive I expect both 0.65 today from today's premiere, and for season average. But things will get easier later in the season - 2BG/something instead of TBBT, (probably) Wayward Pines instead of Gotham, and 2nd cycle of Voice should be traditionally a bit weaker than the 1st one.While last season spring was brutal, first in February The Voice and Pretty Little Liars came/returned into Tue 8PM timeslot, then in March Originals was hit by DST caused HUT-level drop, and a bit by Glee arrival maybe.

I agree about The 100 being an interesting case. I certainly felt like doing the riskiest and boldest prediction of the entire fall best worst case scenario shows with it.

However, I don't even think the limited series thing should be talked about here. It's like Resurrection (which came back to relatively strong levels faced to where it ended last year). They are simply shows that premiered midseason last year. This year, and not the year before, they will be limited series in the sense that they end their runs earlier than the others thus have a greater hiatus. This season I think they should be much more compared with Scandal, Castle, Grey's Anatomy, Body of Proof, The Carrie Diaries, About a Boy, Happy Endings, Apartment 23, etc etc etc

I also agree wholeheartedly about the world series being a huge problem. Not only did arrow and ttp took a big dip last year against it, but arrow and supernatural did the same the year before. Male-leaning CW Wednesdays just seems like an obvious choice for a victim for this unfortunately and I don't see this being the year where it doesn't happen.

@Spot, after all of our complaining, is it just me or is the situation of the TRUE numbers for Sunday shows resolved? It seems that they are finally getting a lift instead of being brought down. I am curious about the TRUE updated post! Resurrection lost in TRUE but I think it's deserved because of the huge lead-in it had.

Ressurection should end this season. I love this show and I'm not the type of person who thinks that "less quantity equals more quality" (22 episode seasons are fine). But this show should be able to wrap up nicely with 2 seasons roughly the length of one regular one. Its doing better than what Revenge would do here, but nothing mindblowing. I mean if ABC knew Once would be pulling a 3.7 and 3.3 for the first two episodes, they'd probably have gone with a new show here, but since those AMAZING ratings came out of nowhere, Ressurection was the best bet.

Bad Judge and A to Z were placeholders. I'm pretty sure Manhattan Love Story was to keep ABC Productions happy since they slashed all their in house comedies last year with Selfie being a necessary pair less expensive than Suburgatory. Mulaney has no excuse. They saw Dads flop even with the MacFarlane name attatched.

I guess watching Simpsons and Family Guy last week reminded people that the general public now thinks both shows suck. Too bad for Mulaney. Although if Mr. Herbaugh's commentary on it applies creatively as well as ratings wise, it was "Mu-lame-y" through and through. Also too bad for Brooklyn Nine-Nine, which has me at least a bit worried until we can see a bit more of where the Fox train wreck[*] winds up.

[*As long as it's not on the rail line that runs through a couple miles of the median of one of the interstates in my hometown, we're all cool.]

I guess a good bit of the Frozen crowd decided Once was their thing. Too bad, I was looking forward to that one being canceled after this season to make room for something good on Sundays @ 8. Resurrection certainly looks more on the borderline, since I can see bigger drops or a slow bleedout. (or, to reference The Returned, a slow, spreading necrotization of flesh[*], aka viewers)

[*Having never watched Resurrection, I have no idea if the two shows ended up sharing that particular plot point, although I can't imagine that ABC would let them get away w/ that when they can go for the ad-friendly mystic mumblings of Michelle Fairley instead. If anyone can clue me in, it would be somewhat appreciated]

That Madam Sec number would probably only be good enough if CBS decided short term financial gain was less important than acclaim and possible future ratings. The Good Wife's failure in traditional syndication on Hallmark suggests such a market is slim at best. That failure could also make The Good Wife itself vulnerable this year, although it at least still has at least 1.6 million coming from the streaming partners and an unknown amount from local stations. Also, given that CBS will have 300+ episodes of CSI by the end of this year, I don't really see that number being good enough to justify any more, even if each episode nets 1.6 million straight up from Spike. You'd probably need to make too many cast changes to eliminate the extra cost, at the cost of even more first-run ratings.

Given that blowout of a Sunday night game, not surprising that it hung that number.

"All sitcoms go through a phase between getting picked up and their premiere date that involves varying and painful degrees of rewriting, recasting, rethinking and other attempts to find a compromise between the show producers and writers thought they were making and the show a network thought it was buying. " --Hank Stuever

The pilot process doesn't allow much time for characters and situations to gel.

It's enough to see, like, first 6 seconds of Mulaney's trailer to conclude it's complete crap. To watch entire 20+ minutes of the pilot and not to realize it won't work? One must be special kind of dumb.Network execs are paid big bucks to pick more winners (and less flops) than average Joe would be. So far, they're 1-of-6 for this season's sitcoms - a blindfolded monkey would do better.

BTW, I adore Hank Stuever. He's my barometer. Whenever he gives a bad review to as how, I always check it, and very often I find it good. And when he gives positive review, almost always show's unwatchable.He's kinda my hero. Despite having absolutely no clue about TV, he writes for major newspapers... about TV. Goes to show one can achieve everything if he puts his mind to it.

That is the point. Execs greenlight a pilot based on who's making it and/or the concept. When 7 or 8 of the 10 pilots you greenlight suck, you still have to choose 4 or 5 to put on the upfront sked in order to wring money out of advertisers. So, you try all summer to fix the show with your notes.

The nets combined have made roughly 14 funny sitcoms per every 10 years. Every network has this problem. I'm saying it's the pilot process. Cable has a much higher success rate (although FX has been bringing the average down lately).

Stuever's probably just relying on what he's seen, heard, and read about making TV from producers, writers, execs, and actors. I'm sure he's gotten away with it for so long because nobody in Hollywood reads The Washington Post.

It feels like stand ups who end up getting picked for TV shows are kinda being typecast into the multicam universe. Perhaps the longest shadow of Seinfeld, after the whole "death of the multicam" critical narrative that sometimes ignores the massive success of Big Bang. (and the fact that some critics actually have spoken up in defense of parts of the show's later seasons; from my own standpoint, last season was actually a fairly solid and enjoyable one)

Yeah, I don't know why FOX insists on trying multi-cams. They've made 2 work in 30 years. That '70s Show came from Carsey-Werner, and the other was Married with Children, which lampooned the traditional sitcom family.

I sometimes wonder if Jaime Weinman isn't on to something w/ his theory that the mechanics of single-cams preclude them from being hits to the same degree that the most popular multi-cams are, and hence why we still get at least token efforts at them, even though comedy producers rarely know how to do them well anymore.